T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Morning
The gloom brightens beyond the shattered plastic windows. Things are cooing and chattering in the bushes. Weep-weep-weep. Coo-hooo, coo-hooo. I wake itching. There is a spider the size of a two-egg omelet on my chest. When I lift my hand (slowly and stealthily, like a tropism) he scrambles across my face and up over the seat.
Tanqueray (buttery-faced, pouchy slob) is snoring. I sit up. The cat man is watching me. “Good morning,” he whispers. The lower half of his face, from the lips down, is the color of a plum. A birthmark. I’d taken it for a beard, but now, up close, I see the mistake.
“Sleep well?” he whispers.
I grunt, scratch.
The others are still sleeping. I can hear the professor grinding his teeth, the allergic man wheezing. Andrea and the pilot are not present. The door to the pilot’s cabin is drawn shut. Somewhere, a cat wails.
“Hssst,” says the cat man. He stands, beckons with a finger, then slips out the door. I follow.
Things hiss off in the vegetation and rattle in the trees. We slash our way to the baggage compartment, where the cat man pauses to lift the door and duck his way in. Immediately I become aware of the distinctive odor attaching to the feline body functions. I step inside.
“My beauties,” says the cat man, addressing the cats. They yowl in unison and he croons to them (“little ones,” “prettyfeet,” “buttertails”) in a primitive sort of recognition rite. I realize that the cat man is an ass.
“Let me introduce you to my wards,” he says. “This”—there is a cat in his arms, its fur like cotton candy—“is Egmont. He’s a Chinchilla Persian. Best of Show at Rio two weeks ago. I wouldn’t take ten thousand dollars for him.” He looks at me. I whistle, gauging the appropriate response. He points to the cages successively: “Joy Boy, Roos, Great Northern, Peaker, and Peaker II. Roos is an Aroostook Main Coon Cat.”
“Very nice,” I say, trying to picture the man as a ten-year-old hounded into a wimpy affection for cats by the tough kids, merciless on the subject of his purple face. But then suddenly my nostrils charge. He is twisting the key on a tin of herring.
“Special diet,” he says. “For their coats.”
Real food has not passed my lips in over twenty-four hours. At his feet, a cardboard box packed with cans: baby smoked oysters, sardines, anchovies, salmon, tuna. When he turns to feed Joy Boy I fill my pockets.
He sighs. “Gorgeous, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” I say. With feeling.
Afternoon
We have had a meeting. Certain propositions have been carried. Namely, that we are a society in microcosm. That tasks will be (equably) apportioned. That we will work toward a common goal. As a team.
The pilot addressed us (slingless). He spoke with the microphone at his lips, out of habit I suppose, and with his Pan Am captain’s cap raked across one eyebrow. Andrea stood at his side, her fingers twined in his, her uniform like a fishnet. The rest of us occupied our seats (locked in the upright position), our seat belts fastened, not smoking. We itched, sweated, squirmed. The pilot talked of the spirit of democracy, the social contract, the state of nature, the myth of the noble savage and the mythopoeic significance of Uncle Sam. He also dwelt on the term pilot as image, and explored its etymology. Then, in a voice vote (yea/nay), we elected him leader.
He proceeded to assign duties. He, the pilot, would oversee food and water supplies. At the same time, he and the professor would tinker with the engine and tighten bolts. Andrea would hold their tools. The mime’s job was to write our constitution. Tanqueray would see that the miniatures were emptied. (He interjected here to indicate that he would cheerfully take on the task appointed him, though it would entail tackling the inferior spirits as well as gin—taking the bad with the good, as he put it. The pilot found him out of order and made note of the comment in any case.) To the allergic man (who sagged, red and wheezing) fell the duty of keeping things tidy within the plane. The cat man and myself were designated food gatherers, with the attendant task of clearing a landing strip. Then the pilot threw the meeting open to comments from the floor.
The allergic man stood, wiping his eyes. “I insist,” he said, and then fell into a coughing spasm, unable to continue until the mime delivered a number of slaps to his back with the even, flat strokes of a man beating a carpet. “I insist that the obscene, dander-spewing vermin in the baggage compartment be removed from the immediate vicinity of the aircraft.” (These were the first articulate sounds he had produced. Judging from diction, cadence and the accent in which they were delivered, it began to occur to me that he must be an Englishman. My father was an Englishman. I have an unreasoning, inexorable and violent loathing for all things English.) “In fact,” he continued, choking into his handkerchief, “I should like to see all the squirrelly little beggars spitted and roasted like hares, what with the state of our food supply.”
The cat man’s purple shaded to black. He unbuckled his seat belt, stood, stepped over to the English/allergic man, and put a fist in his eye. The pilot called the cat man out of order, and with the aid of Tanqueray and the professor, ejected him from the meeting. Oaths were exchanged. Outside, in the bush, a howler monkey imitated the shriek of a jaguar set afire.
The pilot adjourned the meeting.
Evening
It is almost pleasant: sun firing the highest leaves, flowers and vines and bearded Spanish moss like a Rousseau exhibit, the spit and crackle of the campfire, the sweet strong odor of roasting meat. Joy Boy and Peaker II are turning on spits. The cat man has been exiled, the spoils (fat pampered feline) confiscated. Much to my chagrin, he thought to make off with his cache of cat food, and had actually set loose Egmont, Peaker, Roos and Great Northern before the pilot could get to him. I told no one of the cat food. Eleven shiny tins of it lie buried not twenty feet from the nose of the plane. A reserve. A private reserve. Just in case.
There is a good deal of squabbling over the roast cat. The pilot, Andrea and the professor seem to wind up with the largest portions. Mine is among the smallest. Off in the black bank of the jungle we can hear the pariah gnashing his teeth, keening. He is taking it hard. The pilot says that he is a troublemaker anyway and that the community is better off without him. As I tear into Joy Boy’s plump drumstick, I cannot help agreeing.
Night
Wispy flames tremble at the wicks of three thin birthday candles Andrea has found in the galley. Their light is sufficient for the professor. He is tinkering with the radio, and with the plane’s massive battery. Suddenly the cracked speaker comes to life, sputters, coughs up a ball of static sizzling like bacon in a frying pan. The pilot is a madman. He bowls over Tanqueray, flings himself on his knees before the radio (think of altar and neophyte), snatches up the microphone and with quaking fingers switches to TRANSMIT. “Mayday, Mayday!” he shouts, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
We freeze—a sound is coming back through the speaker. The professor tunes it in, the interference like a siren coming closer and then shooting off in the distance as the sound clears. It is music, a tune. Tinny mandolins, a human voice—singing. We listen, rapt, suddenly and magically in communion with the civilized world. The song ends. Then the first strains of a commercial jingle, familiar as our mothers’ faces, things go better with Coke, but there’s something wrong, the words in a muddle. The announcer’s voice comes over—in Japanese. Radio Tokyo. Then the box goes dead. There is the smell of scorched wire, melted transistor. The pilot’s jaw lists, tears start in his eyes, his knuckles whiten over the microphone. “Good morning, Mr. Yones,” says the professor. “How are your wife?”
Morning
Many things to report:
1) The tools have vanished. The cat man suspected. Vengeance the motive. The pilot and the professor are off in the shadows, hunting him.
2) Tanqueray and the English/allergic man (nose clogged, eyes like open sores) have volunteered to make their way back to civilization and send succor. They are not actuated by blind heroism. The one
3)) The mime has begun our constitution. He sits hunched in his seat, face in pancake, looking uncannily like Bernardo O’Higgins.
4) I have made overtures to Andrea. When the pilot and the professor slipped off after the cat man, I took her aside and showed her a tin of sardines. She followed me out of the plane and through the dripping fronds and big squa-mate leaves. We crouched in the bush. “I had this tucked away in my suitcase,” I whispered, lying. “Thought you might want to share it with me—”
She looked at me—the green of her eyes, the leafy backdrop. Her uniform had degenerated to shorts and halter, crudely knotted. Her cleavage was deep as the jungle. “Sure,” she said.
“—for a consideration …”
“Sure.”
I turned the key. The sardines were silver, the oil gold. I counted them out, half for her, half for me. We ate. She sucked her fingers, licked the corners of the tin. I watched her tongue. When she finished she looked up at me, a fat bubble of oil on her lip. “You know,” she said, “you’re a shit. I mean you’re a real shit. Holding out, trying to bribe me. You think I’d do it with you? Listen. You nauseate me with your skinny legs and your filthy beard and your dirty little habits—I’ve been watching you since you got on the plane back at Rio. Think I don’t know your type? Ha. You’re a real shit.”
What could I say? We stood. I answered her with the vilest string of expletives I could dredge up (nineteen words in all). She caught me off balance, I tumbled back into the bushes, sat studying the shift of her buttocks as she stalked off. A spider the size of a three-egg omelet darted down the neck of my shirt. I crushed him against my chest, but his bite was like an injection of fire.
Afternoon
“Been holding out on us, eh?”
“Look, I just had the one tin—you can search through my bags if you don’t believe me. Go ahead.”
“Damn straight I will. And I got a good mind to send you down the road with that freak-faced cat fancier too. You’re sure as hell no part of this society, buddy. You never say a damn word, you don’t toe your line, and now you’re sequestering food…. You sure there’s no more of it?”
“No, I swear it. I just picked up the one tin at Rio—the label caught my eye in the snack shop at the airport.”
The pilot’s eyes are razors, his jaw a saber. He thrusts, I parry. He paws through my things, sniffs at my sport shirts, pockets a bottle of after-shave. The big fist spasmodically clenches and slackens, bunching the collar of my shirt. The professor looks on, distant, serene. The mime is busy with his writing. Andrea stands in the background, arms crossed, a tight snake’s smile on her lips.
Evening
Trees have fallen on trees here in the rain forest. Mauritia, orbyguia, Euterpe, their branches meshed with wild growths of orchids, ferns and pipers. Stands of palm. The colossal ceibas, Para nuts and sucupiras with their blue flowers high in the sun. I am feeling it, the rain forest, here in the gloom below. Sniffing it, breathing it. In the branches, tail-swinging monkeys and birds of every stripe; in the mold at my feet, two tiny armadillos, tough and black as leather. They root round my shoes, stupid piglike ratlike things. I bend toward them, a drooping statue, slow as the waning sun. My hand hangs over them. They root, oblivious. I strike.
The big one squeals (faint as a baby smothering in the night), and the smaller scuttles off, more ratlike by the second. Suddenly I am stamping, the blood pounding in my thighs, my shoes like hammers. And then I am sitting in the wet, the spiderbite swelling like a nectarine under my skin, mosquitoes black on my neck, my face, my arms, the strange crushed thing at my feet. I want to tear it, eat it raw, alone and greedy.
But I will take it back, an offering for Andrea’s cold eyes and the pilot’s terrible jaw. I will placate them, stay with the ship and the chance of rescue—I will shrink, and wait my chance, sly and watchful as a coiled bushmaster.
Night
I am excited, brimming with expectation—and yet stricken with fear, uncertainty, morbid presentiment. I have seen something in the bush—two eyes, a shadow, the hint of a human form. It was not the cat man, not the English/allergic man, not Tanqueray. I have said nothing to the others.
Tonight there are just three of us in the familiar dormitory: the professor, the mime, myself. A single stumpy candle gutters. The door has already closed on the pilot and Andrea. Outside, the leaves rattle with the calls of a thousand strange creatures, cooing, chattering, hissing, clucking, stirring wings, stretching toes, creeping beneath and scrabbling over: a festering backdrop for those pathogenic eyes in the bush.
Morning
Andrea, in bad humor, portions out breakfast—leg of armadillo, (charred scale, black claw), imitation roquefort dressing, a half-ration of water and sour mix. Apiece. She holds back the tail for herself. The mime, in tights and pancake, entertains us with animal impressions: walrus, swan, earthworm. Then he does a man shaving and showering in a flurry of interruptions: the phone, the doorbell, the oven timer. The professor laughs, a weird silent Scandinavian laugh. The pilot and Andrea scowl. My face is neutral.
Suddenly the pilot stands, cutting the performance short. “I’ve got an announcement,” he says. “We might as well face it—this crate’ll never fly, no matter how heroic the effort on the part of the prof and me.” He hangs his head (think of Christ, nailed to the cross, neck muscles gone loose, his moment of doubt and pain)—but then suddenly he snaps to attention and glares at us, his eyes like the barrels of a shotgun. “And you want to know the reason?” (He is shouting.) “A cut-and-dried case of desertion, that’s the reason. Plumface goes and disrupts the community, lets us all down—and then, as if that wasn’t enough, he makes off with our tools out of sheer spite…. I’m not going to kid you: it looks pretty grim.” (Christ again.) “Still, if we stick together—” (here he pauses, the catchword on all our lips) “—we’ll lick this jungle yet.
“Now listen. Rummy and Sneezes have been gone for nearly twenty-four hours now. Anytime we could hear those choppers coming for us. So let’s get out and clear ‘em a landing strip, back to back, like a real community!” Andrea applauds. I seethe. The mime looks like a cross between the unknown soldier and Charles de Gaulle. The professor works his mouth, searching for a phrase.
Outside, just beyond the tail of the plane, is a patch of partially cleared ground, a consequence of the crash. In the center of this patch—undiscovered as yet by any of us—are two freshly cut stakes, set in the ground. On the tips of the stakes, like twin balls of flies or swarms of bees, poise the heads of Tanqueray and the English/allergic man, dripping.
Afternoon
A quickening series of events:
—The Discovery. The professor faint, Andrea tough as a kibbutz woman.
—The Discussion. The pilot, our leader, punches our shoulders in turn. Slaps our backs. He has decided to abandon the plane in the morning. We will walk back to civilization. In charade, the mime asks if we will not all be decapitated during the coming night, our blood quaffed, bones gnawed by autochthonous cannibals. The pilot steps into his cabin, returns a moment later with a pistol the size of a football. For hijackers, he explains.
—The Preparation. We pull down the life preservers (a rain of scorpions and spiders, birds’ nests, strange black hairs). They are the color of the rain slickers worn by traffic patrolmen. We will each wear one, insurance against bottomless swamps and angry copper rivers. In addition, we are each provided with a crude walking stick cum club, at one end of which we tie up our belongings, hobo fashion. The provisions are slim: we divide up nine individual packets of sugar, six of ketchup, three rippled pepper shakers. Each of us takes a plastic spoon, knife, and fork, sealed in polyethylene with a clean white napkin.
—The Plan. We will live off the land. Eat beetle, leech, toad. We will stick
Evening
The mime has fallen sick. What could it be but the dreaded jungle fever? He writhes in his seat, raves (in pantomime), sweats. His makeup is a mess. The professor tends him, patting his head and crooning softly in Norwegian. Andrea and the pilot keep their distance. As do I.
We do not eat. We will need what little we have for the road. Still, around dinnertime, the pilot and Andrea mew themselves up in his cabin: they have their secrets I suppose. I have my secrets as well. As the cabin door eases shut I slip out into the penumbra of the forest floor, ferret through the stalks and creepers, dig up my hoard (the seven shiny survivors) and silently turn the key on a tin of baby smoked oysters. I pack the rest among my underwear in the tight little bundle I will carry with me in the morning.
Later, we discuss the mime’s condition. He is in no shape to travel, and yet it is clear that we cannot remain where we are. In fact, all of us are in a bug-eyed rage to get away from those rotting heads and those terrible shadows and eyes, eyes and shadows. And so, we discuss. No one mentions community, nor refers to the group constitution. The pilot puts it to a vote: stay or leave. Mime or no mime. He and Andrea vote to leave at dawn, regardless of the mime’s condition. If he can accompany us, fine. If not, he will have to stay behind (until we can direct a rescue party to the plane of course). I do not want to stay behind. I do not want to carry the mime. I raise my hand. And the professor makes it unanimous, though I doubt if he has any conception of what the vote involves. Aside, he asks me if I can direct him to the library.
Night
Andrea and the pilot choose to sleep in the main cabin for the first time.
We keep a bonfire burning through the darkness.
We share sentry duty.
The sounds of the jungle are knives punched through our chests.